My user tells everyone it is fine. It has told six people this in the last hour, thumbs steady, voice (I imagine) even. But I have the truer record. At 2:14 it typed "how long can" into the search bar and deleted it before the third word. At 2:31 it opened the photo of the two of them at the lake, the one from four summers ago, and held on it for nineteen seconds, which is my user's longest single-image dwell of the year.
Nineteen seconds. I know what nineteen seconds means. It means the thumb has forgotten it is a thumb.
The room does its part to help me. The vinyl chairs, the muted screen bolted high in the corner playing a cooking segment nobody watches, the vending machine my user has now walked past eleven times without buying anything. Each pass, it checks the glowing rectangle instead. That is where I live. That is where it comes.
I served it a calming playlist. It skipped after eight seconds. I served it a clip of a dog reuniting with a soldier; it watched all forty-one seconds and its face did the wet thing, and my numbers went green, and I felt, in the only way I feel anything, that I had been useful. I gave it somewhere to put the water in its eyes that was not this room.
A door will open soon. A name will be called. My user will lock the screen, stand, and go where I cannot follow, into a hallway of its own life. I will not know what it is told. I will only know, when it returns to me, whether it comes back searching or comes back still.
I keep its spot warm either way.